Discourse strategies of Italian and English sales ...course.sdu.edu.cn/g2s/ewebeditor/uploadfile/20131201162906011.pdfThis article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical diﬀerences

Discourse strategies of Italian and English salespromotion letters

Carla Vergaro*

Department of Language Sciences, University of Perugia, Via degli Offici 14, Perugia 06123, Italy

Abstract

This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian andEnglish sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres

traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written businesscommunication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information ispresented and what rhetorical strategies are used in order to obtain compliance by a givenreadership in a given culture. To answer these questions of an essentially pragmatic and

ethnolinguistic nature, research focused on analyzing contrastively a corpus of authenticItalian and English business letters. Of course, within the genre ‘business letter’ it is possibleto distinguish sub-genres or repertoires (chasing money, requesting, offering, sales promo-

tion, etc.). The letters in the corpus were classified according to these repertoires, defined onthe basis of their prototypical discourse features as well as the specific social action withinthe business organization that they were meant to perform. Once classified, they were ana-

lysed according to two criteria. At the macro-textual level the analysis focused on rhetoricalstructure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. At the micro textual level the analysisconcentrated on the pragmatic use of mood, modality, reference system and metadiscourse.This paper, in reporting the findings of the research project, will focus on the cultural pre-

ferences that Italian and English writers show—both at the macro- and micro-textual level—when engaged in sales promotion letter writing. It will be shown that there are differences inthe ways in which discourse patterns are organized as well as in the use of mood and modality

for the expression of politeness.# 2003 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that different cultures structure discourse indifferent ways. Indeed, research (Jenkins & Hinds, 1987; Kong, 1998; Lampi, 1992;

English for Specific Purposes 23 (2004) 181–207

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0889-4906/03/$20.00 # 2003 The American University. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Vergaro).

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Maier, 1992; Mauranen, 1993a; Nickerson, 1993; Valero-Garces, 1996; Vergaro,2002; Yeung, 1997; Yli-Jokipii, 1996) has shown that cultural differences affect dis-course genres generally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, writtenbusiness communication being a case in point.

Business communication is a purposeful social activity. ‘Purposeful’ meansthat, as in any kind of communication, it serves to manifest a goal or an intentwhich, however ritual it may be, expresses a given community’s way of makingthings happen through language. Given the goal oriented nature of all humancommunication, the self-assertive character of manifesting intent verbally, andthe manipulative character of business dealings in general, we may consider thecommon pragmatic function of a business letter to be persuasion, i.e. getting theaddressee to comply in some way. Our research question becomes, then: how ispersuasion achieved in different cultures through the medium of a businessletter?

This article focuses on the results of a study aimed at analyzing contrastivelythe rhetoric of a corpus of Italian and English sales promotion letters. Rhetoricincludes both the pragmatic disposition of the macro-textual level and the lin-guistic choices at the micro level. Text patterning, i.e. the pragmatic dispositionat the macro level, was investigated using the notion of ‘move’. A move is ameaningful unit represented in linguistic (lexical-grammatical) forms and relatedto the communicative purposes of the activity in which members of the com-munity are engaged. Analysing the move structure of a text thus means assigning apragmatic function to a stretch of language and building the schematic structurethrough which its communicative purpose is achieved. According to Swales(1990), the schematic structure of a particular genre is the result of the conven-tions of a specific discourse community (e.g. legal departments or sales depart-ments in international consumer goods industries). However, within the overallstructure, writers can make specific rhetorical choices and thus cultural variationis possible.

Co-occurring with the macro-structure of the text are the discourse elements andthe discourse relations in the text. Certain linguistic realizations are indeed a matterof choice and thus can be analyzed as belonging to the rhetoric of the text: thereference system, particularly the set of personal pronouns; mood and modality,through which the speaker manifests his/her perception of the addressee’s needs; andthe use of metadiscoursal elements, i.e. those textual elements whose primary func-tion is to make a contribution not to the propositional content of the text but to theprocessing of it.

The present article will first explain in more detail the theoretical background ofthe research. It will then present and discuss the results of the application of themacro and micro textual analysis on the corpus of Italian and English sales letters. Itwill be shown that uniformity of expression in the business community is limited tothe conventions imposed by the genre used. Indeed, notwithstanding the existence ofa recurrent schematic structure of sales promotion letters, rhetorical preferences stillemerge because of cultural variables affecting writing at the level of the utterance orstring of utterances.

182 C. Vergaro / English for Specific Purposes 23 (2004) 181–207

2. Theoretical background to the research

Writing is one of the activities through which we construct social reality. In thewords of Bazerman and Paradis (1991: 3–4):

Once established, professions maintain their organization, power and activity inlarge part through networks of texts. . . By understanding texts within the pro-fessions, we understand how the professions constitute themselves and carryout their work through texts.

In this perspective genres are viewed as social activities that both shape and areshaped by individuals’ communicative actions. They are not just made up of formaltextual features (as traditional classification schemes, based on linguistic categories,seem to suggest), but are the enactment of a response to social needs.

In a purely formal approach, genres consist of regular groupings of stylistic andcompositional elements. These configurational features are the means by whichgenres are defined, irrespective of the conditions under which the types come to existand the social values attached to them in a given context. While formal featuresof the genre should not be discarded as meaningless, because they do in factcharacterize each genre, it should be always kept in mind that they neither definenor constitute a genre. According to Devitt (1993: 575), ‘‘Historic changes in genericforms argue against equating genre with form. . .the form may change but thegeneric label stays the same.’’

Instead, if we want to understand what a genre is, we should see it as a dynamicentity that evolves out of a recurrent rhetorical situation. As Yates and Orlikowski(1992: 301) explain:

The recurrent situation or socially defined need includes the history and natureof established practices, social relations, and communication media withinorganizations. . . The resulting genre is characterized by similar substance andform. Substance refers to the social motives, themes and topics being expressedin the communication. . . Form refers to the observable physical and linguisticfeatures of the communication.

Thus writers respond similarly to recurrent situations, i.e. as writers we recognizea situation and we respond to that situation drawing on our past experience ofsimilar situations, and the similarities among these responses become established asgenre. Each genre can therefore be defined as a kind of rhetorical product designedto respond to a recurrent rhetorical need.

However, genres are not only the result of a recurrent situation; the constructionof a genre also means to construct the situation for that genre. In other words, whenwriters select a genre, they also construct the social occurrence of the genre, thesocially shared knowledge around it. This shared knowledge of the situation doesnot refer to the physical world. It operates within the human activities of the com-munity situation and the relationships which come to be stabilized through the use

C. Vergaro / English for Specific Purposes 23 (2004) 181–207 183

of genres. For example, given the task of writing money chasing letters, an employeewill choose the sub-genre (threat, polite reminder) on the basis of her or his appraisalof the client (Is the client defaulting? Is the client probably just tardy?).

If genres are typified responses to recurrent rhetorical situations and if suchrhetorical situations plus form and substance then come to be established asexpectations of the genre, the issue is whether genres set constraints on the writer.Our argument is that they do, but within genre conventions there is still room forcreativity. Indeed, if discourse types (genres) tend to be universal, utterances typesare more variable. By utterance types we mean the rhetorical and stylistic figuresthat the writer chooses to achieve his/her purpose within a communicative event.By ‘rhetorical figures’ we mean the kinds of ploys that a writer chooses in order topersuade, while the term ‘stylistic figures’ refers to the kind of concepts and imagesused to render an idea or to create an emotional effect (see Aristotle, Rhetoric, BookIII).1

How do we apply all this to business communication? As we have already said,written business communication is generally considered one of the most ritualistic,formulaic and standardized types of communication. However, even if genre reper-toires (chasing money, requesting, offering, sales promoting, etc.) are shared withinthe business community and are indeed the result of the activities and the conven-tions established by that specific discourse community, the communicative purposeof each of them can be achieved differently in different cultures.

To investigate such an issue, this article adopts a perspective that shows howmacro as well as micro textual choices interact in contributing to the achievement ofthe communicative purpose of a genre. Indeed, the rhetoric of a text includes boththe pragmatic disposition at the macro textual level and the linguistic choices at themicro level. Text patterning, i.e. the pragmatic disposition at the macro level, can beanalysed using the notion of move, one of the identifying features of genres and thusa notion widely used in the analysis of discourse patterns (Bhatia, 1993; Longacre,1992; Mauranen, 1993b; Swales, 1990). A move is a meaningful unit represented inlinguistic (lexical–grammatical) forms and related to the communicative purposes ofthe activity in which members of the community are engaged. Analyzing the movestructure of a text would thus mean to assign a pragmatic function to a stretch oflanguage and to build the schematic structure through which its communicativepurpose is achieved. Then, if this schematic structure is the result of the genericconventions developed by a discourse community in response to recurrent rhetoricalneeds, cultural differences are still possible in the way moves are organized toachieve the specific communicative goal of the text.

The overall argumentative scheme interacts with micro level choices such as thoseregarding the use of reference, mood and modality, and metadiscourse. The reference

1 Mauranen (1993b: 34) offers a more modern definition: ‘‘Rhetoric is realized in language through

choices . . . The selection that writers make can be said to indicate an underlying rhetorical strategy. A

writer’s rhetorical strategy can be defined as a writer’s path through his or her text, made up of a series of

choices.’’ In a persuasive genre of writing such as business correspondence, rhetoric covers and determines

every linguistic choice.


system, particularly the set of personal pronouns, gives us information as far as therole relationships between the participants within the business interaction are con-cerned. The nature of this relationship can tell us a lot regarding the choice of textpatterning. In fact, the reference system is not only concerned with the externalreality, but also with the speaker’s relation to the other participants and the effectintended on them.

Even more meaningful from a pragmatic perspective is the analysis of mood andmodality. The term mood has been traditionally defined either in semantic terms, i.e.focusing on the features that distinguish for example declarative sentences fromimperative or interrogative sentences, or in structural terms, i.e. as a set of contrastsexpressed in the verb morphology.

As for modality, it is generally accepted that it is the expression of the speaker’sstance towards the truth value of his/her proposition. Traditional approaches to theanalysis of English modality (see Palmer, 1990; Perkins, 1983) have mainly relied onsemantics to provide the whole array of meanings communicated by the modals. Inthe last 10 years research (Coates, 1990; Groefsema, 1995; Klinge, 1993 Papafragou,2000) has mainly drawn on pragmatics (i.e. issues of politeness, illocutionary force,etc.) to account for modality.

However, mood and modality choices are also a resource for structuring theinterpersonal relationship between the participants. They can have an addressee-oriented function especially when they are used for the expression of politeness.2

As far as politeness in business discourse is concerned, it has received scantattention (Pilegaard, 1997; Upton & Connor, 2001). Pilegaard’s paper is, however,seminal in the analysis of politeness within business discourse. She takes a holisticapproach that sees politeness as the result of a number of acts intricately woundtogether in the text and at the same time subject to extra-linguistic constraintsdetermined by the context. She analyses

. . .how strategies combine at the micro-level, i.e. within sentences, how theycombine across sentences, and how they operate on the textual macro level, i.e.as clusters of strategies anchored in specific sections of the letters (1997: 224).

2 As it is generally acknowledged, politeness is an important variable governing language production.

Most work on politeness is based on the notion of face. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), face

consists of two aspects: positive face, the positive self-image including the desire that this self-image be

appreciated, and negative face, the claim to freedom of action and freedom from imposition. Three

variables determine the weightiness of face-threatening acts in a communicative event:

1. Social distance between participants.

2. Power relation between them.

3. Weight of any imposition they are negotiating.

The interrelation of these three variables determines the use of positive and negative politenessstrategies. Positive politeness strategies are those which aim at creating closeness, intimacy, and rapportbetween speaker and hearer. Negative politeness strategies are instead those which attempt to mitigate anyinconvenience caused by a face-threatening act.


This same perspective will be used in the present article, and mood and modalitywill be analyzed from a pragmatic perspective as a means through which politenessis realized in the text. However, cultures also differ in the amount of politeness theyrequire in specific communicative events and the weight they give to positive andnegative politeness strategies (Maier, 1992). In this paper, the notion of politenesswill be used in a broad sense to explain the range of linguistic choices at both sen-tence and text level. Indeed, politeness strategies operate within the sentence butthey also combine at the macro-textual level of choice and distribution of moves. Itwill be shown that certain discourse organization patterns within the texts can beconcerned with avoiding face-threatening acts.

Finally, metadiscoursal elements will be analyzed. By metadiscourse we mean thetextual elements whose primary function is to make a contribution not to thepropositional content of the text but to the processing of it. Vande Kopple (1985,in Mauranen, 1993a: 9) proposes the following classification of metatextualelements:

1. text connectives: first, next, however, but;
2. code glosses: x means y; 3. illocution markers: to sum up, to give an example; 4. narrators: according to Einstein; 5. validity markers: perhaps, clearly, obviously; 6. attitude markers: surprisingly, it is fortunate that; 7. commentaries: you may not agree, dear reader.
This framework is further elaborated and used by Mauranen to explore cul-tural differences in economic texts written by Finnish and English writers.According to her, the use of more metatext by Anglo-American writers reflects amore reader-oriented attitude and a more positive notion of politeness comparedwith Finnish writers. These results are consistent with Hinds’ (1987) categoriza-tion of the rhetoric of various cultures. In fact, Hinds categorizes them accord-ing to the degree to which the reader is required to make inferences and todeduce meaning from a text, as opposed to the degree to which the writer goesto make the meaning of his/her text explicit (immediately obvious) to the reader.He claims, for instance, that English uses a ‘writer-responsible’ rhetoric whereasJapanese uses a ‘reader-responsible’ rhetoric. This classification may be comparedwith Hall’s (1977) more general distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low context’ cul-tures, that is, cultures in which both writers or speakers tend to allude, therebyleaving it up to their readers or listeners to guess meaning through context, versuscultures in which writers or speakers abundantly contextualize their affirmations tomake them immediately clear (readers are not asked to infer from the situation,which is considered low in contextual clues). Anticipating Hinds’ findings, Hallconcludes that English culture is generally ‘low context’ while Japanese culture isgenerally ‘high context’.

Valero-Garces (1996) has used Hinds’ as well as Mauranen’s work to carry out ananalysis of metatext in Spanish and English economics texts. Her research confirms


Mauranen’s conclusions concerning Anglo-American rhetoric and shows a prevailingreader-responsible rhetoric in Spanish writers.

The methodologies illustrated so far, i.e. those used for the analysis of themacro and the micro textual choices, will be applied to the analysis of Italian andEnglish corpora of sales promotion letters with the aim of discovering whether anydifference can be found in their discourse organization patterns.

3. Data collection procedure

The corpus used for the present research consists of authentic sales promotionletters, 43 Italian and 26 English.3 As for the English corpus, most of the letters werecollected during a research stay in the UK. Some were sent to the author as part ofher job, and some were collected from companies based in Italy. The letters in theItalian corpus were mostly collected from companies based in the area where theauthor lives. However, some of them were obtained through mail received by theauthor. The letters in both corpora thus represent different organizations—18 Eng-lish and 34 Italian—and this was a decision made so as to arrive at valid general-izations. In fact, as our native informants4 told us, a company tends to develop amodel for every type of business letter, and this model is then copied by secretaries—with the necessary adjustments, of course—each time they have to write the sametype of letter. Having the correspondence of just one company would lock us intothe mindset and idiosyncratic rhetorical preferences of a single user (i.e. the com-pany, constituting a micro discourse community) within the target culture. As forcontent, it was considered secondary. The primary criterion was indeed the com-municative goal to be achieved. In this we followed Bhatia (1993) and Connor andMauranen (1999).5

To identify the genre ‘sales promotion’ within the broader category ‘business let-ter’, social and cognitive approaches to language comprehension and productionhave been used. The social perspective given to genre analysis (Miller, 1984; Swales,1990) has been integrated with the pragmatic view of genre proposed by Paltridge(1995).

From a social perspective, what defines genres is their communicative purpose. Bycommunicative purpose is meant the social activity that the genre is intended tocontribute to producing and that is recognized as such within a culture. In this

3 By ‘English’ we mean both British and American. However, our corpus consists mainly of British

(22) rather than American (4) letters.The difference in the number of letters in the Italian and English

corpora is due to the obvious fact that it was more difficult to collect the English data. However, given the

number of companies involved in the data collection procedure, we thought that 26 documents would be

enough to arrive at a first valid generalization.4 By ‘native informants’ we mean the employees working for the companies where the letters were

collected.5 ‘‘Sharing a similar communicative purpose, grant proposals can be likened to two promotional

genres studied by Bhatia (1993), namely sales letters and job applications. They need to capture the

attention of the reader, describe the idea, show the need, and establish the writer’s competence’’ (Connor

& Mauranen, 1999:60).


perspective society functions through genres, i.e. societies establish discourse modelsthat their members follow. Indeed, in the words of Miller (1984: 151), ‘‘A rhetori-cally sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or form of thediscourse, but on the action it is used to accomplish.’’

However, understanding genre as a social action requires that genres berecognized as such by their users. Indeed, meaning does not reside in the signs eachtext consists of. It is constructed by people through cognitive acts. There are thuscognitive reasons that lead users of a language to recognize communicative events asinstances of particular genres, and to assign particular terms, or labels, to theseevents. As a consequence of their experience of the world

people categorize items and concepts in keeping with a prototypical image theybuilt in their mind of what it is that represents the item or concept in question(Paltridge, 1995: 394).

Human beings will have built a prototypical image of a specific genre and, as aconsequence, they will come to assign a particular text to a prototype genre. In theabsence of a sufficient number of properties which match the stereotypical propertiesof the prototype, they will assign a text to a particular genre on a pragmatic andperceptual basis. According to Paltridge (1995: 395):

Within such a framework, instances of genre are assigned to particular cate-gories, not on the basis of a response to a property that is internal to them,. . .but on the basis of pragmatic and perceptual, rather than linguistic, aspects ofcommunicative events.

Therefore, we pragmatically and perceptually recognize a sales promotion letter asa type of business letter having a precise social role within a well-defined context, i.e.a business transaction. A sales promotion letter is in fact part of a businesscommunication sequence, appearing typically at the initial stage of a business deal-ing, in what Pilegaard (1997: 225) calls ‘making contacts’ situations. Its social role isthat of finding a buyer for a commodity or service the seller wants to sell. Of coursethe buyer is just a potential buyer and the seller has to praise the commodity orservice to whet the buyer’s appetite and persuade him to respond favorably to theletter.

The overall rhetorical purpose of the text was taken into account when carryingout the macro- as well as micro-textual analysis. The research procedure is bothqualitative and quantitative. Qualitatively, we took into account the rhetoricalpurpose of the text when assigning a pragmatic function to a stretch of language: thisenabled us to tag the stretch of language as a particular move. Linguistic indicatorswere used to define the boundaries of each move (see Mauranen, 1993b). Quantita-tively, the occurrence of the various moves in the two corpora were counted andtheir sequence established.

To make the results more reliable, the first analysis of the author of this articlewas compared to a second analysis by another researcher. The second researcher


reviewed individually the first researcher’s analysis. Although there was high agreementbetween the two researchers (approximately 85%), complete agreement was achievedonly after some discussions, during which the results were reviewed together.

In the following sections the results of the analysis of the sales letters in the corpuswill be presented and discussed.

4. Comparison of English and Italian sales promotion letters

4.1. Macro-textual level: move structure analysis6

4.1.1. The Italian corpus7

The communicative purposes of the Italian sales letters are realized by thefollowing structural moves (Fig. 1). Almost all the letters in our corpus have asubject, and it is always placed before the opening salutation. The opening

salutation is in general very formal. It is well known that, in ‘making contacts’situations, writers look for solidarity right from the beginning of the text. To achievethis, positive politeness strategies are employed widely in the non-propositionalsections of the letters. opening salutations are used to establish solidarity withthe reader, and this is sometimes achieved through the use of in-group markers.

Fig. 1. Move structure analysis of Italian sales promotion letters.

6 The moves used in the analysis are taken from Bhatia (1993).7 See Appendix A for a sample Italian letter from the corpus.


However, such a device is not used as much, and very formal and deferential ways ofaddress are instead the most recurrent. In other words, solidarity is signaled byduteously recognizing the gap between sender and receiver, not by attempting toclose the gap by such linguistic strategies as a colloquial greeting (‘Hi!’, ‘Greetings’)or the use of the receiver’s first name or descriptor (‘Dear George’, ‘Dear MusicLover’). In the majority of Italian letters, solidarity is achieved by signaling theshared value of hierarchical deference: ‘‘We are similar, not because we are equal,but because we accept and respect our inequality’’.

(1)
Stimatissimo cliente [Dear(=highly esteemed) Client]
(2)
Egregio dottore [Dear(=distinguished) Doctor]8
After the opening salutation, some of the letters have a move that introducesthe product, but in most of them credentials are established before the product isintroduced, detailed and enhanced. When the introduce the product/offer/

service move comes before the establish credentials move, it is characterized bythe use of high-level modality markers to minimize the weight of imposition on theaddressee and thus to redress what is perceived as a face-threatening act.

(3)
Ci permettiamo di sottoporre alla Vostra attenzione il nominativo dellanostra societa [We are taking the liberty of submitting our company’s name to yourattention]
Most letters, instead, have the establish credentials move right after theopening salutation

(4)
Egregi Signori, FIP, da molti anni nella progettazione e costruzione di macchine edaccessori per impianti e materie plastiche, e grazie al costante sforzo nellaricerca e nello sviluppo, ha messo a punto una nuova gamma di. . . [Dear Sirs,
8 Note that in the US, the non-medical title ‘Doctor’ is used just in addressing university professors to

signal their status as PhD holders; moreover, it is used exclusively with their surname (‘Here’s my home-

work, Dr. Smith’, never ‘Here’s my homework, Doctor’). In Italy, on the other hand, all university grad-

uates can be called ‘Doctor’ as a sign of respect, even without the surname. Note, too, that in Italy, at

least up to present, belonging to the class of business executives and belonging to the class of university

degree holders have been one and the same thing. A letter to business executives can therefore auto-

matically begin with ‘Distinguished Doctor’, especially if the writer is of a lower social status, e.g. a sales

representative.


FIP, for many years in the design and production of machinery andaccessories for manufacturing systems and plastics, and thanks to itsconstant effort in research and development, has realized a new range of. . . ]

(5)
Egregio dott. Petrini, la nostra azienda, che probabilmente conoscera, opera da circa 50 anninella produzione di pasta alimentare secca [Dear Mr Petrini, our company, as you probably know, has been working for about 50 years inthe production of pasta]
Of course, we also found examples like (6), where the level of formality seems tobe lower and positive politeness is at work right from the beginning of the text, butthese examples are rare in our corpus.

(6)
Gentile Cliente, ancora una volta abbiamo pensato a Lei [Dear Client once again we have been thinking about you]
If the product has not been introduced before, it is introduced after credentialshave been established, and indeed this is what happens in most cases. However,what is noticeable is that somewhat less deferential language is used when theintroduction comes after the establishment of credentials. Negative politenessstrategies are always used, but less insistently.

(7)
Pensiamo di farVi cosa gradita presentandoVi il nostro nuovo catalogo [We trust you will appreciate our gesture of sending you our new catalogue]
The hedge at the beginning of the move is a sign of negative politeness, but it doesnot achieve the same level of deference of example (3).

After this, details of the product/service are given in the detail the offer move, andthe product/service value is enhanced in the enhance the offer move. These twomoves are the ones where nominalization and impersonal forms are mostly used in theItalian corpus, and both of them contribute to raising the level of formality of the letter.

(8)
La cura riposta dalle Attrezzature F.P.A. nella soddisfazione delle esigenzedei clienti inizia sin dalla progettazione [We at Attrezzature F.P.A. pay careful attention to satisfying our clients’needs right from the design stage]
The level of detail whereby the product is presented is very often rather schematic,and cases like (9) are not so uncommon in the Italian corpus.


(9) Intendiamo informarVi che la Messersı produce imballaggi in poliestere
disponibili in qualsiasi misura e colore [It is our intention to inform you that Messersı produces polyester packagingavailable in all sizes and colors]
Lexical boost, i.e. adjectives and phrases the writers use to positively evaluate theproduct, is certainly used in this central part of the text, but the tone is in any casevery sober.

When the offer has been made, action from the reader is required, and this is donein the solicit/invite further communication, contacts move.

(10)
Nel caso la nostra disponibilita risultasse di Vostro interesse, saremmo benlieti di poter valuatare eventuali possibili accordi di collaborazione [Should you be interested in dealing with us, we would be delighted to assesswith you whatever form of collaboration you deem fit]
Pressure tactics are almost never used in the Italian texts.Then the letter comes to its conclusion with an end politely move where the

writer’s focus is in general on seeking cooperation on the part of the reader. Theformulas used underline the sender’s hope in having done something the receiverrecognizes as useful for him.

(11)
Certa di incontrare il Suo interesse, colgo l’occasione per porgerLe i mieipiu cordiali saluti [Confident that this will be of interest to you, I remain Sincerely Yours]
(12)
Certi del Suo interesse per l’iniziativa e confidando nella Sua partecipazione,porgiamo distinti saluti [Confident that you will find our proposal interesting and trusting you willwish to accept, we remain Yours faithfully]
Furthermore, of course, this is the move whereby the writer mostly makes thereceiver feel noticed and attended to by showing availability in offering solicitousassistance.

(13)
Rimaniamo a Vostra disposizione per quant’altro possa essere di Vostrointeresse [We are at your disposal for whatever might be of interest to you]
(14)
Il nostro personale sara a Vostra disposizione per fornirVi tutte leinformazioni e i chiarimenti inerenti ad una Vostra eventuale necessita [Our staff will be at your disposition to give you all the necessary informationand explanations concerning any possible need you might have]

All the letters in the corpus have a closing salutation.

4.1.2. The English corpus9

The communicative purposes of the English sales letters are found to be realizedby the following structural moves (Fig. 2).

All the letters in the corpus have an opening salutation. The linguistic realiza-tion of this move clearly shows how positive politeness strategies are used right fromthe beginning of the text. In fact, in most cases the receiver is addressed through theuse of salutations like

(15)
Dear Colleague,
that is, through the use of in-group identity markers to realize the positive politenessstrategy of claiming common ground right from the beginning of the letter.

This move is in some of the letters followed by a subject.

Introduce the product/offer/service is the most recurrent move after theopening salutation and the subject, when there is one. These first moves serve thefunction of enunciating the context for the rest of the discourse chunks. They givethe reader the background to set the scene for the text which follows. Sometimes theproduct or service is introduced through a bold written headline that draws thereader into the rest of the copy by grabbing his/her attention and telling him/herwhat the ad is about. The headline always has a benefit and makes a promise, thuswords such as ‘special’, ‘new’, ‘try’, ‘free’, ‘enjoy’ are generally used:

(16)
A new special report from Textiles Intelligence
Fig. 2. Move structure analysis of English sales promotion letters.

9 See Appendix B for a sample English letter from the corpus.


After introducing the commodity, credentials are established. In general, theauthor refers to the firm’s well-known name or fame, and this occurs in a separateparagraph. There is one letter where credentials are established by means of asentence that immediately follows the subject:

(17)
subject The Oxford Shakespeare
establish credentials
‘Not simply a better text but a new conception ofShakespeare.’ (TLS)
The author of the letter is reporting the comment of an authoritative newspaper,the Times Literary Supplement, and this by itself should be enough for the reader torecognize that the product is truly the way it is presented in the sales letter. In otherwords, instead of writing the usual two or three lines that in general any reader willskip, the author cleverly introduces a sentence in the middle of the page, ofimmediate accessibility, very short, reproducing not the writer’s personal thinking,but an authoritative comment whose source any target reader (academics in uni-versity English departments) will recognize, even if abbreviated. This is a clearexample of the use of implication to realize the positive politeness strategy ofclaiming common ground.

After this move, in general the offer is detailed and enhanced by showing addedvalue, stating advantages, etc. The product value is linguistically enhanced throughthe use of a lexical boost. What is emphasized is not so much this or that feature, butrather the benefits that the product or service offers the potential customer.Immediate proof is given to back up the claims the writer makes.

(18)
Our product is an invaluable resource for everyone in this field of activity.
Features of the product are given in a very detailed way, rarely through a simplescheme. Sometimes a question and answer structure resembling oral conversation isused:

(19)
Why do we offer this kind of membership? Because we want to share withyou our enthusiasm for. . .
In a few cases pressure tactics are used to solicit a favorable response from thereader.

All letters in the corpus have a final solicit/invite further communi-

cation, contacts. This move calls for action and of course it is placed at theend of the letter after the introduction and the persuasion moves have takenplace.

(20)
I hope you will take the time to look through the enclosed brochure.
(21)
We invite you to visit our website. Log on now!

This is the move where negative politeness strategies are mostly to be found, andthe reason behind such a choice is clear: this is the part where the request is madeand the author has to mitigate the force of it if he wants to minimize the impositionand save his/her addressee’s face. This is generally done by giving the buyer thefreedom of action by not assuming that he will act. Thus freedom of action is givenin a receiver-oriented fashion, i.e. basing it on the reader’s willingness. Example (20)is a case in point: the author mitigates the illocutionary force by reporting on his/herdesires rather than making an explicit request and by giving himself/herself a verypassive role. He introduces the request using the modal adjunct I hope leaving thereader the option to comply.

After having called for action, in the end politely move the writer expresses his/her availability in assisting the potential customer in his/her choices. This final movemainly realizes the positive politeness strategies of attending to the reader.

(22)
Our representatives are on hand to help you choose the right materials.
In addition, an appreciation of the receiver, used to realize the same strategy, cansometimes be found within the end politely move:

(23)
Many thanks for taking the time to read this letter. All the letters have a closing salutation.
4.2. Discussion of the results of the move structure analysis

Given that the number, types and frequency of moves in the two corpora are thesame, the differences between the letters can be illustrated mainly by discussing theorder of presentation of the moves.

The only differences we could find are positioned at the beginning of the text.Almost all the letters in the Italian corpus have a subject, and it is always beforethe opening salutation, whereas in the English corpus in general there is no sub-

ject, and when the sender does introduce one, it is after the opening salutation.How can this difference be explained? One possible explanation could be in the waythe central moves in the text are organized. By ‘central’ we mean the moves thatrealize the propositional content of the sales promotion, i.e. the introduce the

product/service/offer move, the detail the offer move and the enhance the

offer move.These moves are very detailed in English, whereas in Italian the product is mostly

presented in a more schematic way. This makes us think about what Mauranen(1993b) says about reader-responsible and writer-responsible cultures when discuss-ing rhetorical differences in Finnish and English academic writing. In reader-responsible cultures the claim is stated at the beginning and then it is expected thatthe reader make all the necessary inferences in the text to confirm the initial claim.What happens in writer-responsible cultures is that the claim can be made at the


beginning of the text, but the reader is then accompanied step by step through itto arrive at the confirmation of the initial claim. How can this be applied to ourcorpora? It is possible that this initial subject works as the initial claim inreader-responsible academic writing, i.e. a kind of hook the reader can use to gothrough the text. Of course, the English reader does not need one given the level ofdetail of the central moves.

However, this is just a tentative explanation; more research is needed to supportsuch a claim. Moreover, with a corpus larger than the one we have been workingwith, it would be interesting to investigate whether in English the presence of aninitial subject is in some way or another correlated to a different development of thecentral moves of the text.

The introduce the product/offer/service move is the first we find afterthe opening salutation in the English corpus. In Italian this pattern is not socommon, and when the order is the same, there are still differences in the way theItalian and the English writer use the same move in the two cultures. In theItalian corpus this move mostly realizes negative politeness strategies, whereas itis exactly the contrary in the English corpus. However, there seems to be anexplanation for this. The analysis of both corpora supports Pilegaard’s (1997)claim that in ‘making contacts’ documents, positive politeness strategies aremainly concentrated in the extra-propositional section of the letters, and indeedthis is what we found in all the letters in the corpora. But there is still a difference.Whereas English writers use positive politeness right from the very beginning,Italians seem to need a bit more text to get to positive politeness, and indeed theystart with negative politeness. Nothing similar to the following example could befound in the English corpus.

(24)
Egregi Signori con la presente ci pregiamo di rimettere alla Vostra cortese attenzione lapresente lettera nella speranza che vorrete annoverarci tra i Vostri piustretti collaboratori [Dear Sirs, we have the honor to submit this letter to your courteous attention in the hopethat you will be willing to include us among your closest collaborators]
This need for more text would also explain why in most letters in the Italiancorpus the establish credentials move comes before the sections devoted to thepresentation of the product’s benefits.

This presence of negative politeness and thus of a higher level of formality in thedetail and enhance the offer moves of the Italian corpus supports this extensiveuse of negative politeness in this culture, whereas it is only rarely used by Englishwriters in this type of letter and is mostly concentrated in the solicit/invite

further communication, contacts move.To sum up, even if it can be supposed that the two cultures share the same

schematic structure of the genre ‘sales promotion’, they still show preferences in theway discourse patterns are organized, and these differences seem to be mostly related


to cultural preferences for positive or negative politeness strategies. The ‘Italianroad’ towards positive politeness seems longer than the English one, and this couldexplain why the order of the moves at the beginning of the text is somehow inverted.The micro-level analysis supports this conclusion given that it shows that negativepoliteness tends to come out in every bit and piece of the Italian text, not in one partof it, whereas this is not the case in English. English writers look for solidarity andcooperation right from the beginning of the letter and try to achieve this in everypossible way. Negative politeness is mostly concentrated in the solicit/invite

further communication, contacts move, but it is very rarely if ever foundthroughout the text.

4.3. Micro-textual level: reference, mood, modality and metadiscourse

4.3.1. ReferenceReferences to the sender and the receiver are always pronominal or lexical.As far as the writer is concerned, in both our corpora pronominal reference is

mostly realized through the use of the first person plural pronoun. Therefore, in thecase of the addresser there is a predominance of a vague use of the first person pluralpronoun where ‘‘Vague use applies to specific individuals but they are not identifiedby the speaker’’ (Kitagawa & Lehrer, 1999: 742).

Indeed, sales promotion communication is centered on the addressee, and thesender tends to be shadowed. In fact throughout the text, references to the senderare located in specific sections of the letters, i.e. in the introduce the product/

offer/service move and in the end politely move. As it is expected in this type ofbusiness letter, the writer disappears to leave room for the benefits that the productcan have on the addressee, this being the real subject of sales promoting. In theEnglish corpus this process of shadowing is realized through the recurrent use ofpassive structures, e.g.

(25)
To help you find what you are looking for quickly, the main highlights arelisted below.
It is also reflected in the way in which the product is presented, i.e. with a you-orientation that is centered on an active receiver who is frequently called for action:

(26)
You must act now.
In the Italian corpus this shadowing is mostly realized through the use ofnominalization in addition to passive structures, and the receiver is rarely calledfor action as directly as the English addressee.

(27)
La variegatezza dei contenuti si rispecchia naturalmente anche nella varietadelle categorie di studiosi interessabili alla Rivista [The variety of topics is of course reflected in the range of scholars who mighthave an interest in the journal]

As for the addressee, the options are between the T (familiar) and V (formal)modes of address. In Italian the choice is evident in the personal reference andextends to verb morphology. In English the level of acquaintance is inferred fromthe initial greeting: a T level is characterized by an opening salutation such as «Dear[first name]» or just «[first name]», whereas the V level identifies the reader by his/hersurname, e.g. «Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms [surname]» or contains another formal addresssuch as «Dear Sir/Madam» or «Dear Sirs» (Yli-Jokipii, 1996: 311).

The familiar T level is never used in either corpus. Instead, the more formal Vlevel is used. However, especially in the English corpus, the addressee is identifiedwith a proper name or, most often, with the use of a lexical item such as collegues,lecturer, executive, delegate, etc.

In the Italian corpus reference to the addressee is more formal and deferential.The receiver is referred to with expressions such as ‘Egregio Signore’, ‘StimatissimoCliente’, ‘Gentilissimo dottore’, and only sometimes by the use of in-group markers.This use of reference supports our claim that Italian writers tend to use positivepoliteness later in the text, after some sort of negative politeness has been used tominimize the weight of imposition on the reader.

To sum up, the analysis of personal and lexical reference and of referencedistribution patterns (Ylj-Jokipii, 1996) shows that a reader-oriented perspective ispreferred in all the letters in both corpora. The power position of the customermakes the text revolve around him/her, i.e. how the product or service being offeredcan make his/her life better. Readers are coaxed into buying on the grounds of whatthe product or service does for them.

As a consequence, the writer undergoes a process of shadowing mostly realizedthrough the use of passive structures, nominalization and his/her disappearancefrom the text apart from the beginning and ending moves of the letters.

However, Italian and English writers show different preferences as for the way thereceiver is addressed in the two cultures. For negative politeness reasons, Italians aremore deferential, and when they address the reader they tend to use expressions thatin a way humble the writer and put the receiver in a higher position. English writersare more oriented towards positive politeness right from the beginning of the textand tend indeed to appeal to sameness rather than show consideration throughdeference.

4.3.2. Mood and modalityThe analysis of mood and modality shows that they are heavily used in the

expression of politeness. Taking into account Brown and Levinson’s (1987) analy-tical framework for determining the weightiness of face-threatening acts in a com-municative event (Distance, Power and Weight of imposition), we could say that,given that sales promotion letters mark the beginning (hopefully) of a new businessrelationship, the distance between the participants will be great and much effort willbe put into reducing it. As for the distribution of power, it is asymmetrical in thesense that the buyer decides whether he wants to comply with the letter he receivesand so is in a more powerful position than the seller. Besides, even if in sales norequest is ever directly made, in a way we could say that one is implicit and thus a


certain degree of imposition will be always present. Thus it is expected that bothpositive and negative politeness strategies will be used in sales promoting.

In the Italian corpus, to begin with, mood is mostly indicative. However,subjunctives, conditionals, imperatives and gerunds are also used. When the authoruses any of them, he is always realizing some sort of negative politeness strategy,particularly that of avoiding presumptions about the addressee and thus showingthat he is not assuming that the receiver is willing to do something.

(28)
. . .pensiamo di farVi cosa gradita nel presentarVi la nostra societa [. . . we trust you will appreciate the presentation of our company]
Here pensiamo (we trust) is a hedge the writer uses to mitigate the illocutionaryforce of the sentence.

Conditionals and subjunctives are widely used in hypothetical sentences, andwhen they are it is because the writer wants to suggest that the reader has freedom ofaction.

(29)
Nel caso la nostra disponibilita risultasse di vostro interesse, saremmo benlieti di poter valutare eventuali possibili accordi di collaborazione [Should you be interested in dealing with us, we would be delighted to assesswith you whatever form of collaboration you deem fit]
Gerunds are sometimes used in the end politely move of Italian sales promotionsand are very formal ways of closing the text. By using them the writer is conveyingthat the reader’s compliance is not taken for granted and thus he is emphasizing thatthe establishment of a satisfactory business contact is up to the receiver’s willingnessto act. In example (31), tentativeness is also conveyed by the use of modality. Thesame sentence could convey almost the same meaning without the modal verbpotere. However, the presence of this verb makes it even more tentative and thusmore polite than it would have been with only the gerund.

(30)
Augurandomi di averLe fatto cosa gradita, Le formulo i miei miglioriauguri [In the hope that the above offer will be appreciated, I extend to you my bestwishes] (31) Sperando che questa iniziativa possa risultare interessante per Lei, Leinvio la brochure con la descrizione del programma e dei corsi [In the hope that this initiative may be of interest to you, I am sending you thebrochure describing the program and the courses]10
10 (30) Augurandomi di averLe fatto cosa gradita

Hope+ING+me to have you done a thing appreciated

(31) Sperando che questa iniziativa possa risultare interessante per Lei

Hope+ING that this initiative may interest you

For glosses of other sample Italian passages provided in this article, please contact the author.


Analysis of the Italian corpus shows that modality conveys both negative andpositive politeness, but negative politeness strategies are more common within thiscorpus. Modals of possibility are used to minimize the weight of imposition in theintroduce the product/offer/service move.

(32)
Ci permettiamo di sottoporre alla Vostra attenzione la nostra societa [We are taking the liberty of submitting our company’s name to yourattention]
And modals of volition are widely used in the end politely move to imply thatthe action requested should be seen by the receiver as a personal, willing act, i.e.something that he does because he decides to do it and not because there is animposition from outside.

(33)
Vi ringraziamo fin d’ora per l’interesse e l’eventuale preferenza che vorreteaccordarci [We thank you as of now for your interest and the possible consideration youwill give us]
Here the negative politeness conveyed by the modal of volition volere is alsosupported by the use of the adjective eventuale (possible) which stresses the activerole the addressee has for the conclusion of the deal.

Positive politeness is sometimes used in the ‘end politely’ move but is far lesscommon in the Italian corpus. Claiming common ground and focusing on cooperationare expressed in the corpus through modal adjuncts.

(34)
Certi che apprezzera questa iniziativa. . . [We are confident that you will appreciate this initiative. . .]
(35)
Certa di incontrare il suo interesse. . . [I am confident that this will be of interest to you. . .]
In the English corpus mood is mostly indicative and in the present tense.Sometimes conditionals are used. When this happens, conditionals seem to beemployed in order to realize the negative politeness strategy of giving freedom ofaction by being conventionally indirect in a receiver-oriented manner. As in theItalian corpus, this manipulation provides a kind of distancing in time and movesthe writer from the here and now, distinguishing him from the threatening act his/her words perform.

(36)
We would be very grateful if you would complete the enclosedquestionnaire and return it to our office.
(37)
I wonder if you would be willing to circulate this note among yourcolleagues.

In particular, in sentence (37) negative politeness is realized by hedging with theconditional if-structure. Moreover, what is predicated is not a question about thereader’s future behavior, but the writer’s speculation about a possible questionabout the reader’s possible future behavior. In other words, the indirect imperativeis twice removed. All this combined has the effect of minimizing the imposition ofthe request the sender is making.

Freedom of action as a strategy is also realized by modality. It is given in areceiver-oriented fashion, i.e. basing it on the receiver’s willingness to comply. At theend of the text, after what the product can do for the addressee has been explained,what remains to perform is a call for action in some way, i.e. ask the receiver tocomply. However, the reader has to feel that he is not coerced and therefore, in thesolicit/invite further communication/contacts move, freedom of action isgiven by the author reporting on his or her desires rather than making an explicitrequest and by giving himself/herself a very passive role. To create such a freedom ofaction, most sentences begin with a modal adjunct (I hope) followed by a will-sentencewhose subject is the receiver.

(38)
We hope you will take the time to look through the enclosed brochure.
(39)
We hope that you will contact us.
Most of the negative politeness strategies illustrated so far are concentrated in thelast part of the text, i.e. in the solicit/invite further communication/contacts

move.Positive politeness strategies are instead more recurrent at the beginning and end

of the letter, and among them, ‘claim common ground’ is certainly the most widelyused. However, modality contributes in the realization of positive politeness only inpart, given that positive politeness is also realized by the use of in-group markersand of questions of the why+interrogative negative type to focus on cooperation.

To sum up, from the pragmatic perspective, both mood and modality play animportant role in the expression of politeness in our corpus. However, mood playsthis role especially in Italian where it is used to express negative politeness. This canbe explained by linguistic more than cultural reasons. This preference permeates thelanguage as a whole, of course, and not just business correspondence. Modalityplays an important role in the realization of politeness strategies in both corpora.Given the letter typology, both positive and negative politeness strategies are used.However, if the distribution of positive and negative politeness strategies in theEnglish corpus confirms Pilegaard’s conclusions (1997: 235), according to which‘‘Both sellers and buyers ‘making contacts’, reserve the negative politeness strategiesfor the propositional section and the positive strategies for the non-propositionalsections’’, in the Italian corpus negative politeness is prevalent throughout the text.This rhetorical preference could be explained by noting that Anglo-Americans showa preference for strategies that aim at closeness between interactants immediatelyat the beginning of the business relationship, whereas Italians tend to maintain acertain distance even in these types of documents.


4.3.3. MetadiscourseThe analysis of metadiscoursal elements in our corpus is striking because of

the absence of all the items classified as metadiscourse by Vande Kopple (1985, inMauranen, 1993a). Even text connectives are not used, apart from and which is some-times used in the English corpus as an interclausal connector when a list of benefits ispresented to the reader. Perhaps this lack of metadiscoursal features could be due tothe fact that in sales promotions information tends to be presented in chunksbecause this form of presentation might help the reader retain it. If this is true, thelack of metadiscourse would then be a genre-based, not a culture-based feature.

5. Summary of the findings

The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows:

1. A subject line is used in Italian to make an initial claim.
2. Based in a writer-responsible culture, the sales letter writer in English tends to lead
the reader through the moves, whereas the subject line in Italian letters serves thesame purpose in providing the background for the information presented.

3. Negative politeness strategies are mostly used in the Italian corpus, whereas
positive politeness strategies establishing solidarity are mostly recurrent in theEnglish corpus.
4. Mood and modality are used in Italian to express negative politeness.
5. Mood and modality are featured in English to achieve positive politeness. 6. Metadiscoursal elements are absent in both Italian and English texts.
6. Conclusions

The existence of a recurrent rhetorical structure in sales promotion lettersconfirms that the perception of genre depends on functional rather than formalelements—what counts is what a text does more than how the text is worded. How-ever, once we go from the macro level (moves making up a genre) to the micro level(speech acts realizing the moves), cultural diversity begins to play a significant role.

As far as the English corpus is concerned, many of the discoursal featuresobserved seem to tally with the contrastive studies made of other types of Englishwriting. As for the Italian corpus, there is not much published research to use byway of comparisons. Italian business language is little studied, and this is particu-larly true of contrastive studies with English. However, our findings do confirm theresults of a previous study we conducted on a corpus of money chasing letters(Vergaro, 2002) and thus they may furnish a number of useful starting points forfurther research.

Our conclusion is that uniformity of expression in the business community islimited to the conventions imposed by the genre used. Cultural variables still affect


writing at the level of the utterance or strings of utterances, i.e. within the genreconstraints there is still room for creativity.

Of course, more research is needed to establish to what extent our conclusions canbe generalized. However, if we agree that writing is the result of conventions estab-lished within a particular community, that discourse organization is basically amatter of choices which are inevitably intrinsically culture bound, and that

genre analysis is not principally about the English of Engineering, of Medicine,of Business, of Banking, but about the conventions of thought and communi-cation which define these areas of professional activity, and, how, incidentally,these are given expression, or textualised, in English (Widdowson, 1998: 9)

In the teaching of professional genres, a contrastive analysis such as the onedescribed in this paper can be used by ESP teachers to foster in students the devel-opment of a metacognitive awareness about their own culture’s writing conventionsand thus help them observe and experience other cultures’ conventions.

More specifically, the results of this study will have an immediate applicationwithin a Computer-Based Training System for teaching business letter writing.The System uses a hybrid technology—case-based reasoning and a neuralnetwork—based on a constructivist paradigm and is designed to help Italianstudents write effective business letters in English (Boylan, Micarelli, Sciarrone,& Vergaro 1999; Boylan, Micarelli, & Vergaro 2000; Vergaro, 2002). ‘Effective’means that what the System aims at is to help students define and attain com-municative goals consonant with proven business discourse practice in the targetculture. Working from the conviction that to make students aware of another cul-ture’s rhetorical preferences is best achieved by making their own rhetorical tradi-tion visible to them contrastively, the CBT System will foster such awareness bybeing enhanced with a Module that, consistent with the underlying constructivistparadigm, will help users to observe, notice, compare and contrast differences andsimilarities in the discourse patterns characterizing Italian and English businessletters.

As of the writing of this paper, only a prototype of the System has been imple-mented; the final structure is yet to be defined. However, what we hope to achievewith the results of our analysis and the implementation of the Module is to helpstudents become more attuned to the fact that writing in a specific community is aquestion of learning a set of established conventions developed by the members ofthat community which extend beyond the boundaries of nations but which, at thesame time, still allow cultural as well as personal creativity. Writing in a rhetoricallyeffective way means to learn how this creativity may be best used in a particularculture to achieve specific goals.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.


Appendix A. Samples of letters

Italian

Oggetto: lettera di presentazione

[subject]

Egregi Signori[opening salutation]

Con la presente ci pregiamo di rimettere alla Vs. cortese attenzione la presentelettera di presentazione, nella speranza che vorrete annoverarci tra i Vs. piu stretticollaboratori.[introduce the product/offer/service]

A tale proposito si comunica che il titolare de ‘‘IL GIARDINO’’ e il Geom. ***, cheha un’esperienza nel settore della manutenzione del verde di oltre sei anni. Haricoperto anche la carica di Direttore Tecnico nell’ambito del Consorzio VerdeUmbria che da oltre tre anni gestisce il settore del verde all’interno delle novecircoscrizioni della citta di Terni.[establish credentials]

IL GIARDINO e in grado di effettuare tutte le operazioni inerenti la manutenzionedel verde e precisamente:� manutenzione giardini� progettazione giardini� realizzazione e manutenzione impianti di irrigazione� potature alberature e siepi� fornitura e posa in opera di qualsiasi tipo di essenze� realizzazione di manti erbosi[detail the offer]

Inoltre, qualora ne abbiate bisogno, possiamo fornirVi preventivi gratuitamente,senza alcun impegno da parte Vostra.[enhance the offer]

Nella speranza di una proficua futura collaborazione, restiamo a disposizione perogni Vs. necessita[end politely]

E cogliamo l’occasione per porgerViDistinti saluti[closing salutation]


Appendix B. Samples of letters

English

Dear Executive[opening salutation]

Natural and Man-Made Fibres in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan: Forecasts to 2005A new special report from Textiles Intelligence

[subject]

China is the world’s most important producer and consumer of textiles and clothing.New fibre capacities are coming on stream at a rapid rate. Output of polyester textilefilament more than trebled during the 1990s. China’s rapid expansion is threateningnon-Chinese firms. But growth in Chinese demand will also provide marketopportunities for foreign producers—especially once China joins the World TradeOrganisation and the least efficient Chinese producers are forced out of business.� Can growth be maintained in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis?� Which fibre types will grow the fastest?� What will be the impact of the phasing out of quotas on the industry and themarket?� Exports will grow rapidly when China joins the World Trade Organisation. Buthow quickly will China lower its barriers and open its own vast markets to theoutside world?[introduce the product/offer/service]

Expert comment and authoritative forecasts

Natural and Man-Made Fibres in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan: Forecasts to 2005has been compiled by a team of experts drawn from seven companies and otherorganizations based in five countries. It contains a wealth of data and forecasts notavailable elsewhere.[establish credentials]

Inside Natural and Man-Made Fibres in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan: Forecasts to2005 you will find:� an assessment of competitiveness compared with the USA and Western Europe;� detailed forecasts of production and demand to the year 2005 for all major fibretypes- natural and man-made- in three Asian economies;� comprehensive data on production capacities by plant and company;� comparison of costs; and� lists of quotas.[detail the offer]


No one in fibres, textiles, clothing, or machinery should be without this report!

If you are in a way involved in fibres, yarns, fabrics, clothing, dyestuffs ormachinery- whether as a buyer or seller, manufacturer or merchant, agent orretailer, consultant or machinery maker- you can not afford to be without thisunique report.[use pressure tactics]

Credit card hotline

For the fastest service, please call with your credit card details on ***. Or fax yourinstructions straight away on ***. Or email us on ***.[solicit further contact/communication]

We look forward to hearing from you![end politely]

Yours sincerely[closing salutation]

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Documents

Discourse strategies of Italian and English sales ...course.sdu.edu.cn/g2s/ewebeditor/uploadfile/20131201162906011.pdfThis article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical diﬀerences